This post contains a collection of quotations from some excellent books. You can find other roundups of the best books about different fascinating topics in the Best Books and Quotations section. If you have the Kindle app, the Location links at the end of each quotation will take you straight to the relevant section.When I […]

The idea of learning to sing, for many of us, is more than a little bit scary. For me, it seemed like a somewhat magical skill that some people simply had (and which I lacked). I learned very early to avoid Karaoke, and never even did much singing in the shower. A friend of mine […]

I’ve written in the past about how failure is essential to learning, but it can be heard to connect the theory to the practice. What does “good failure” look like, and how do we encourage it? Last night, I was free-playing the guitar for an hour or so while I waited for my computer to […]

In any learning journey, there are certain inflection point when you seem to suddenly get it. How do you create these moments, having revelations faster? What, exactly, “it” is varies on the skill. I remember the first time I ever actually heard tones in Mandarin Chinese. It felt like the language suddenly opened up. We’ve […]

One of the most common warnings you’ll hear when you teach yourself guitar is that “you’ll learn bad habits.” I can’t deny this is true. Without a guitar teacher, it’s easy to fall into a number of traps like playing too fast or too slow, using bad positioning with your hands, and so on. If […]

We have special kinds of music for whenever we want to feel motivated: sports, driving in the car, clubs, parties, pre-parties. So what about studying? I’ll start by discussing the neuroscience of good study music. You can scroll down and jump straight to the review of Focus at Will (the dedicated focus music streaming service) or check out […]

For many musicians, professionals and hobbyists alike, having a “good ear” is a big deal. I’ve never had a good ear, but it’s always been a dream to be able to play by ear. After 3 months of using the practice techniques on this blog to learn the guitar, I felt like I was starting […]

A couple months ago now, I decided I wanted to learn a thing or two about music. I evaluated different music learning tools, and ended up deciding to start my quest by learning the guitar. I expected that learning music would be interesting and perhaps a bit of fun, but nothing prepared me for the […]

I’ve written a lot about how to practice correctly to learn the most. Sometimes an example is worth a thousand explanations, though. I’ve been learning to play the guitar as an experiment on myself, so I’ll use my experience with the guitar to explain my practice schedule. Even if you’re not learning the guitar, though, […]

Last week, I began using the guitar-teaching game Rocksmith as I prepared to write my review of it. Pretty early on, I noticed something strange: no matter how hard I focused on the little notes moving towards the line, the game was counting them as “misses.” What was going on? Was the game broken? Was […]

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The other day, I spent my morning volunteering an the San Quentin prison with a program called The Last Mile. As Wired recently reported, this nonprofit seeks to help inmates prepare to get a job on the outside. I was as shocked as anybody when a friend of mine called up asking me to teach advanced […]

This weekend, a friend of mine brought a “Go” board to a party. I’d heard a lot about this notoriously complex and ancient game. Most recently, it was in the news because a computer finally beat a master Go player. This triumph of computer programming illustrates just how hard Go is. Computers were regularly beating […]

There is an essential skill which many of us have lost. This loss is a symptom of how easy it is to publish. Or tweet. Blog. Snap. Broadcast. Record. Our filters have dropped. We say what is on our minds and hope for a “like.” Really, our ancestors were no different. They wanted the same social approval. […]